Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere.

Chapter 1, Why Sentences?, p. 2

We marvel at them; we read them aloud to our friends and spouses, even, occasionally, to passersby; we analyze them; we lament our inability to match them.

Chapter 1, Why Sentences?, p. 4

No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure.

Chapter 2, Why You Don't Find The Answer In Strunk And White, p. 17

It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.

Chapter 3, It's Not The Thought That Counts, p. 26

Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.

Chapter 3, It's Not The Thought That Counts, p. 33

People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.

Chapter 4, What Is A Good Sentence?, p. 37

Sentence writers are not copyists; they are selectors.

Chapter 4, What Is A Good Sentence?, p. 38

What we know of the world comes to us through words, or, to look at it from the other direction, when we write a sentence, we create a world, which is not the world, but the world as is appears within a dimension of assessment.

Chapter 4, What Is A Good Sentence?, p. 39

Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.

Chapter 4, What Is A Good Sentence?, p. 42

Just as you can practice three - word sentences or sentences that travel across time zones, so can you practice writing sentences that breathe unshakable conviction.

Chapter 5, The Subordinate Style, p. 48

The word "essay" means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression that prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable.

Chapter 6, The Additive Style, p. 62

" The idea - the core idea of humanism - is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them,.."

The category of first sentence makes sense only if it is looking forward to the development of thematic concerns it perhaps only dimly foreshadows.

Chapter 8, First Sentences, p. 99

They are their own monuments, as is this quietly thrilling sentence.

Chapter 9, Last Sentences, p. 130

" The idea - the core idea of humanism - is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them,.."

Chapter 10, Sentences That Are About Themselves (Aren't They All?), p. 137